Field
This disclosure is generally related to distribution of digital content. More specifically, this disclosure is related to a system for a secure encryption performance enhancing proxy in a content centric network.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to create a vast amount of digital content. Content centric network (CCN) architectures have been designed to facilitate accessing and processing such digital content. A CCN includes entities, or nodes, such as network clients, forwarders (e.g., routers), and content producers, which communicate with each other by sending interest packets for various content items and receiving content object packets in return. CCN interests and content objects are identified by their unique names, which are typically hierarchically structured variable length identifiers (HSVLI). An HSVLI can include contiguous name components ordered from a most general level to a most specific level.
Digital content may be carried over wireless links based on a transport control protocol (TCP). However, because the digital content can travel over both a radio link and a wireline link, TCP may result in poor performance due to the different channel responses for a transport protocol for a radio link and for a wireline link. One solution is to split or proxy the topology by inserting a middle box (e.g., a performance enhancing proxy, or a PEP) which terminates the radio transport loop and establishes a second transport loop to the wireline system. This allows the transport protocols to optimize performance on each side of the proxy and keep the air interface full with a minimum of duplicate data due to TCP retransmission requests. However, today's network traffic uses an increased amount of encryption, which prevents middle boxes (such as PEPs), from intercepting encrypted sessions. As a result, the PEPs cannot proxy the encrypted traffic. The encrypted traffic loses the benefit of the proxy over the wireless link, and the PEPs are unable to do much more than packet shaping to adjust data rates.
While a CCN brings many desired features to a network, some issues remain unsolved for implementing a secure encryption proxy in a content centric network.